Friday, February 13, 2009

A Story - A Short Form

On February 8th we flew from Vancouver to Seattle and then into Las Vegas.

We met up with Jameson and his buddy Tyler (who is now our buddy...yay!) at the airport. We drove out to the 13-mile campground about 20 minutes outside of Las Vegas.

It was freezing, windy, and quite unpleasant. And, to top it off....we woke up to this:

Freek snow storm! Climbing trip = ruined.

...or so we thought. You see, with sandstone, you need to let it completely dry before you climb on it. It needs at least 24 hours and sometimes 48 hours to dry out. Otherwise you are going to damage the rock, break holds, and your protection has a better chance of not pulling out of the rock.

But...thankfully, later in the morning, the sun came out and the wind started howling, and it began to look like this:

So, we toured around a little bit, knowing that if no precipitation fell in the next 24 hours, we could possibly climb on Tuesday. So, like everybody should do when you are waiting around...we grabbed a latte in Vegas.

After lunch, we thought, "hey, its really really nice outside! We can't climb on sandstone, but lets find some dry limestone to climb." So, we did exactly that:

It was a great way to finish a climbing day that could have potentially been lost.

Tuesday was awesome. We woke up to this:

and this...

so we did lots of this...

Wednesday was just as good. What did we do? Find Rock!!

and climb!!

But ya know...at the end of the day...it's not about climbing. It's not even about beautiful places. Don't get us wrong...we love these things...but its ultimately about: